The Long Silence
By HOWARD LISNOFF | Counterpunch, August 24, 2008
For many years, now decades, I have been silent as a Jew about Israel’s relationship to, and treatment of, the Palestinian people and my place as an American Jew in that equation. Recently, I looked back at the Jews who I have known personally, as friends and acquaintances, and examined how their views about Palestinians and Israel have affected me and deepened my silence.
Following the lightning-fast victory of Israel over Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and the resulting improvement in relations between Egypt and Israel after the Camp David Accords in 1978, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip appeared solidified. The seeming invincibility of Israel in both the 1967 and 1973 wars led, I believe, to a false perception of invincibility and self-righteousness among many Jews took hold. No longer would Jews be victims, as during the Holocaust, but they would meet any challenge and react with force whenever and wherever a threat appeared. It portrayed Jews as strong as reflected in Israel’s treatment of its neighboring states, and in particular in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The government of Israel was showing the world how rapid and lethal a response could be to attacks, such as suicide bombings, against the people of Israel. Jews would never again be viewed as weak and subject to vicious mass attacks and attempted genocide as symbolized by the Holocaust. The stereotype of Jews as weak would be destroyed forever! The development of a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons is perhaps a reflection of the interplay between these historic and psychological factors. Who is more impervious to an outside threat than a state that possesses the ultimate power of weapons of mass destruction?
Jews in the U.S. were expected to accept their roles as supporters of whatever policy Israel adopted. Those Jews who wavered would be open to the most vicious attacks. Perhaps no one better typifies this phenomenon than Professor Norman G. Finkelstein, who lost his bid for tenure at DePaul University in May 2008, after a campaign of vicious attacks aimed at silencing his scholarly criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and the industry that had grown up, primarily in the U.S., to profit from the horror of the Holocaust. His books, among them The Holocaust Industry (2000) and Beyond Chutzpah (2005) have drawn stinging attacks. Among his most vehement detractors is Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard.
The power of the Jewish lobby in the U.S. is partially explained by studying the monetary might behind that influence. The most powerful of these organizations is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which in the 2004 alone had a $33 million budget with a staff of 140.
James David reports in his article “A Passionate Attachment to Israel,” that the Israel lobby had contributed $41 million to congressional and presidential candidates over the past 54 years (2002). University of San Francisco Professor Stephen Zunes states, in the article “The Strategic Functions of U.S. Aid to Israel,” that “more than $1.5 billion in private U.S. funds…go to Israel annually.”
Peace and Justice Post 
Palestinians play a wild card
September 5, 2008By Mark LeVine | Asia Times, Sep 5, 2008
Lost in the international uproar over Russia’s Olympic Games-eve invasion and occupation of Georgia and now the political and meteorological storms sweeping across the United States is a seismic shift in the dynamics of another conflict, one which offers a similarly vexing challenge to the core policy goals of the United States, Europe and many Middle Eastern governments to that posed by a newly belligerent Russia.
Largely unreported in the American and Western media, on August 10, two days after the start of both the Russian invasion and the Olympics, Palestinian lead negotiator Ahmed Qurie declared that if the peace process did not advance towards a final settlement soon, Palestinians would stop pursuing a two-state solution and demand the establishment of a bi-national state with Israel.
After the Annapolis peace conference held last November in the United States, Israel and the Palestinians agreed to form two negotiation teams to reach an agreement on major permanent status issues before the end of this year. Hopes are fading for any agreement within this timeframe, especially on statehood, which makes Qurie’s comments all the more pertinent.
Qurie, better known as Abu Alaa, explained, “The Palestinian leadership has been working on establishing a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders … If Israel continues to oppose making this a reality, then the Palestinian demand for the Palestinian people and its leadership [would be] one state, a bi-national state.”
In effect, pressure would be put on Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas to halt all negotiations and demand that Israel annex the Palestinian territories with all their residents. Indeed, Abbas has hinted he might dissolve the PA and demand a bi-national state if progress is not made soon.
According to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, a forum has begun activities in the Occupied Territories and the Palestinian diaspora aimed at dismantling the PA and the return of responsibility for the territories to Israel. A petition in this regard was published this week in the London-based, Arabic-language al-Hayat daily newspaper.
To date, Israel’s leadership has refused to get excited by the Palestinian threat of a bi-national state. “It’s all a tactic,” said a senor government official was quoted in the media as saying this week. “I would not bet on it in a casino.”
All the same, the issue represents a sea-change in Palestinian attitudes towards the peace process. Even at its lowest ebb, former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat threatened merely to declare a state within the West Bank and Gaza.
Today the mere possibility of a bi-national solution so frightens Israel’s leaders that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert equated it with apartheid, warning that if the two-state process failed, Israel would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished”.
The reason Israel would be “finished” is clear: given the current state of relations between Jews and Palestinians it is difficult to envision Jews maintaining control over the territory, holy places, military, economy and immigration of Israel/Palestine in a bi-national state, especially after the demographic balance shifts in favor of Palestinians, as many experts believe it is close to doing.
In such a situation, Israel as a Jewish state would either “vanish from the pages of time”, as Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has infamously advocated, or an all-out civil war would erupt that would likely result in the exile of the vast majority of Palestinians from both Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Despite these apocalyptic possibilities, the peace process today stands close to the bi-national abyss. The more Palestinians feel they have nothing left to lose, the more likely it becomes that they will press for “one person, one vote”, returning in essence if not rhetoric to the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s pre-1988 advocacy of a “secular democratic state” in all of pre-1948 Palestine.
In reality, this turn of events should not surprise anyone. Already a generation ago, Israeli geographer Meron Benvenisti argued in his 1987 West Bank Data Base Project that by the mid-1980s, the Occupied Territories had become so integrated into Israel that it was no longer possible to separate them. By the time Palestinians and Israelis were ready to negotiate a “divorce” in the early 1990s it was too late to do so.
Continued . . .
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Tags:Israel, Meron Benvenisti, occupied territories, one bi-national state, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, the Annapolis peace conference, West Bank and Gaza
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